Alkhalikoi

People who keep geocoins, even though they are meant to keep moving along...

I slipped while stepping over a guard rail and had my entire 250+ frame land on my inner thigh. Fortunately -- I suppose -- I've got enough meat on my legs that the contact patch was about eight inches long, but it left me with a bruise that wrapped about 300 degrees around my leg and with a welt the size of a plaintain.

I once decided to CITO a brown balloon that was dangling from the top of a barb wire fence. Except it was a long piece of freshly killed squirrel guts! Ugh!

Congratulations!

I'm 43 and I take my kids out quite a bit. But I only know of a couple of cachers in their teens/early 20s around my neck of the woods that cache. Given the inherent silliness of this thing, it's not a game for the overly self-concious. It takes people a few years of life experience to stop caring what other people think. Some, sadly, never get it. While caching isn't for everyone, it's certainly *not* an activity for people who are worried about what strangers think about them..

I was in Costa Rica for just four days on business, three of them in San Jose and I was never able to get out for a cache in the city, but then had one day up in Guanacaste. There was one cache a couple of miles away from our hotel and I had a narrow window in the morning to get it, so I ended up dropping about US $45 on taxi rides there and back to grab one cache. Sort of silly, but still glad I did it!

I hope Jeremy Irish and his folks are making millions upon millions of dollars. I hope Jeremy Irish can kindle his fireplace with hundred dollar bills. For a very small investment -- a couple of hundred bucks in a GPS unit and four years worth of premium membership -- I've gotten a terrific hobby, a lot more exercise, and seen places in my own home town I never knew about. For the price of a couple of months worth of going out to dinner? For the price of five or eight tanks of gas? Good on them all.

Drinking beer and caching and manifestly not incompatible! I had a brilliant 9 mile, 3300', 26 cache hike yesterday that included a two-beer lunch. It was glorious!

Please don't apologize about duplicate threads! I do not quite understand the impulse to tell people not to bring up the same topic. You are just making conversation and it's not like we're going to run out of room. I live pretty near Alamogul, the #1 cacher, and this is what he does. I saw a cache about a mile from my office go live about 11 am. I thought I might take an early lunch to go grab it. By the time I could get out of here - about 45 minutes after the cache went live - he'd already snagged it, despite a cold, pouring rain! Don't doubt these guys are serious about this and can easily knock out 50 or more day in and day out.

For the last two caches I found I dropped in a 1 Ringgot (Malaysian currency) but didn't take anything. That's worth about 32 cents in the U.S. but I suspect that most geocachers have never seen one. I've got a baggie full of foreign coins from probably 7-8 different countries and they'll fit in most caches larger than a bison tube. Although be careful with coins! I was cleaning out some of my grandfathers stuff and sorted out the silver coins and a few obvious interesting foreign coins, but had this old half-peso from Mexico from the 1920s. I figured it couldn't be worth more than a buck or two since it was pretty dinged up and left it as swag. Later turned out the coin was probably worth about $30-$40. Some cacher got lucky from my idiocy!

I carry foreign coins to use as trade items. I ask friends who travel abroad to bring me back their pocket change, and sometimes I buy them by the pound from a local coin shop. I have a baggie with foreign coins that I use for trade items as well. When I travel I always "keep the change" though in some countries coins are rarely used any more as they have little value. When I get home I toss a couple coins of each value into my sons coin collection box and the rest go in the baggie for trade. I'm actually started to get a little low. I need to go traveling again. There are a lot of coin collecting web sites where one can buy foreign coins in bulk but so far I haven't done that yet. I've also seen one of those $100 billion Zimbabwe dollar bills while I was in Tanzania. When I was in Korea, I saw four rolls of Korean "pennies" (10 won coins) in the change drawer of the hotel check-in desk. He was happy to give me one, as he explained they weren't worth much ($0.008 or so) and rarely used in circulation but he was confused about why I wanted to buy four rolls of them! But those lasted me for months as good swag and only cost me a couple of USD!

My best friend from the time I was a toddler is black and while he's gone geocaching with me a few times when he's out in California -- and he rather likes it as do his kids -- he said he'd be reluctant to do it where he lives in suburban Denver precisely because of the police profiling thing. He manages a dozen software engineers for a tech company, but if he's poking around a suburban trail or a park looking for small tupperware, he's going to get hassled by the local police, often as not. He's an avid hiker and backpacker, as am I, but this game isn't worth the trouble as he sees it.

I have an 8 year old and a four year old and they're both quite into it. We'll often just grab a quick cache or two when were out and about doing errands on weekends, so to make sure I've always got some trade stuff, I've taken to keeping a stack of foreign bills in my wallet. Lately, I've been going through a stack of Zimbabwe $10,000,000,000,000 notes which I bought in bulk on Ebay (100 for about $40). There are a lot of cheap bills to be found on Ebay (Zimbabwe dollars and Vietnamese Dong are both available for less than $0.50 a bill in bulk (search for "currency +bundle" and you'll find quite a few).

Just one, in Guanacaste: http://coord.info/GCPWH8 -- cost me about $50 in cab fare to get there and back from where I was staying -- but totally worth it. Certainly caching in any traditional sense in North Korea would be suicidal. My notion -- and I assumed it wouldn't fly -- was to have a virtual for being in the conference room at the DMZ where you can walk into the first 15' of North Korea while still protected by South Korean MPs. Mostly, I was trying to scam a way to be the first guy to ever get a cache in the DPRK, but it didn't happen! Ah well!

My two additional countries are Costa Rica and South Korea. Despite begging in an I'm-sure-undignified-manner, Geocaching wouldn't let me bulid a virtual in North Korea within the confernce rooms at the DMZ.

I found one cache today, but it was 9402 miles from home and was for the 16th country in which I've found a cache. Now my "Home Location Stats" section has distinct caches on four different continents for the farthest, north, south, east, and west finds. I totally want to be you when I grow up! I just have three countries under my belt (not Mexico or Canada, though).

Thanks folks for the input. Hope that we can pull this trip off!

Awesome! I have a few FTFs, many more or less by accident. In mid-August, I did get two FTFs on two islands in a reservoir in the Sierra Nevadas that had been placed about a month previous. Happy to get FTFs like that. This one was better still!

Ahoy! My wife and I are thinking about taking our two kids (then 5 and almost 9) to the UK next summer. We're pretty well traveled in the UK, including Bath, but were thinking about starting our trip out in the Cotswolds to do some walking, geocaching, castle-gawking and such, before heading to London for the tail end of the trip. The kids have never been to the UK, so there will be plenty of Tower of London/Buckingham Palace/Imperial War Museum stuff when we get to London herself. I've found a few .KML files of the Cotswolds Way hike and wanted to do some sort of three-day walking/geocaching trip in there with the kids. We're not worried about about the distances -- the kids are, thanks to caching, really good (and tolerant) hikers -- but we were looking for (a) any generalized suggestions about which piece of the Cotswolds trail to take (we were thinking about starting out about 3 days/30 miles from Bath) and ( to see if any of you good folks could point us to a route .GPX of caches on the Cotswolds trail. My wife and I have been to Bath before so we'd love to go back, but not on our "don't miss" list. Thanks in advance for any pointers. -Andrew More-or-less San Franciscoish, California.

I don't trade for stuff unless I have my kids in tow, but I keep a stack of Ten Trillion Dollar bills (that is, ten trillion zimbabwe dollar bills) in my wallet so I always have something cool to leave.

A few thoughts: (1) The airport already exists. To the extent airport-related caches are allowed (and they are) taking sides one way or the other (allow a cache or don't allow a cache) is just as political. (2) The presence of a cache (or lack of it) isn't going to affect your local politics about airport noise. If you have a problem with the airport, I think your energy is better channelled toward airport management, rather than Geocaching.com. I see that, here, they don't agree with your preferences, but I'd be just as bothered if GC decided to take sides about an airport and banned otherwise acceptable caches because it didn't like the airport. (3) "Commercial" in the US, at least, generally means "private sector" commercial. Airports and such tend not to be thought of as "commercial" but rather as governmental.

I think I've run into other cachers about 10-12 times in my 1600ish finds. I think the most fun was when I was putting on my pack for a 7-mile hike, another cacher (who I had run into a couple years before) pulled up and we ended up having a great hike together. Another time, when I was about 300 miles from home, I was looking for a cache on a pier in Pismo Beach, CA. As I'm looking for it with a couple of caching buddies a nice couple asked if we were looking for a cache. They'd found it a few minutes before and it turned out they were cachers from near home.

In all events, I'm gratified that geocachers came out as a group to help look for the guy. Not that I'd expect anything less, but still...

I've done one in Arizona that required the use of a fifteen foot pole with a hook to both open the cache (which was about 18' in the air) and I'm getting one next weekend (well, attempting) that apparently requires the use of a bicycle tire pump!

I will play a game of solitaire on your behalf for $5.